The financial advisor to Iraqi Prime Minister, Madher Muhammad Salih, has stressed the need for beginning a set of measures that encourage civil activity to invest and produce.
Saleh told the Iraqi News Agency (INA): “What matters today is the accelerated growth in the energy sector, whose contribution to the to GDP constitutes approximately 45%, and its direct and indirect effects extend to the activity of the national economy and the business cycle in Iraq by more than 80% because of the positive effects resulting from the rise in oil prices and the increase in the quantities produced and exported of crude oil under OPEC.”
He added that “launching real investments in supporting, forming and building productive capital wealth will remain at the forefront of the sustainability of the achieved positive economic growth, which was initiated by the construction sector under the influence of the initiative of the Central Bank of Iraq to provide nearly 2 trillion dinars that went to finance the housing activity, which is the activity that is really responsible for employing about 20% of the Iraqi labor force, in addition to the growing insistence shown by the Iraqi agricultural activity in supporting the basic food security of Iraq despite the water scarcity, and all this contributed to making the growth rate in the gross domestic product exceed the growth rate of the population, which is a positive indicator towards the welfare of society.
Saleh considered it “an appropriate opportunity to re-examine the policies and procedures related to encouraging national investment, especially private sector investment, in one package that helps lift administrative restrictions that are useless to the aforementioned activity and facilitate the business environment with effective government decisions that end in expanding the base of tax flexibility, as happened in the recent Cabinet decision and others, and decreasing of all administrative restrictions, as well as adopting the best administrative and executive steps that must be followed in transforming the economic surpluses in the national economy (represented in the strength of the economy’s liquidity) into dynamics that lead to real investment as important financial levers available for use in spending on development and the operation of production factors that lead to sustain the national income growth.”
